Writing the book that will help traditional brick and mortar businesses move to a progressive internet marketing plan

Google Analytics: Your Map To Success

by Joe Manausa, MBA on March 29, 2011

If you missed yesterday’s post on the key internet marketing metrics, a quick-read will ease you into today’s review of some of the critical information that you can gain from tracking your company’s website performance in Google Analytics.

If you believe that customer activity and feedback should drive the actions of the organization, then you should know where to find this important information, and how to apply it to your internet marketing efforts.

Hits – Every time a file is sent from the server which hosts a company website, to the browser of a visitor, it is recorded as a hit. So a page on the site with ten pictures would generate 11 hits for the site. I personally do not pay attention to a “hit count” because it does not give me any actionable information about what is actually happening.

Daily Uniques – This is the number of unique visitors that arrive at your company website each day (weekly and monthly uniques are also something worth tracking). Monitoring the trend in number of unique visitors each day allows the internet marketer to see the results of the passive marketing plan. Active marketing measures will cause the daily uniques to fluctuate, but implementing passive marketing measures on a regular day is the best way to see a continued rise in the average number of visitors that come to the site each day.

Total Pageviews – A pageview is similar to a hit, in that it measures each time a new page is viewed on the site. But pageviews is very relevant because it only measures the page, not the files contained on the page, so if a visitor comes to the site multiple times, the visitor only generates one unique visit per day, but can register multiple pageviews each day.

Top Referrers – Part of every good internet marketing campaign requires link building, and the top referrer section of the Google Analytics report tells the internet marketer which links are the most productive.

Traffic Sources – This section of the report tells you all of the different places sending traffic to the company website. Most likely, you will be shocked when you find out how far and wide your readership spreads, and the traffic source report can often times give clues to where further efforts could produce premium results.

This is only the beginning of the list of key metrics that you and your company leadership should track. The most important function of a business is generating and servicing customers, and by tracking your metrics on a regular basis, you can tell whether or not you are trending in the right direction. We will continue with more of these important measurements in tomorrow’s blog post.